SAINT MUNGO’S CITY

A Novel

BY SARAH TYTLER

AUTHOR OF ‘THE BRIDE’S PASS,’ ‘WHAT SHE CAME THROUGH,’ ‘BEAUTY AND THE BEAST,’ ETC.

colophon

IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.

London
CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1884
[All rights reserved]

SAINT MUNGO’S CITY.

CHAPTER I.

YOUNG MACKINNON’S MARRIAGE CONTRACT.

Nearly thirty years ago, three highly-respectable ‘single ladies,’ sisters, of the name of Mackinnon, the youngest of them already turned forty, the eldest over fifty, and showing decided tokens of what had been from the beginning a sort of ready-made old-maidishness, dwelt in what was still a commodious house in one of the old squares of Glasgow. It was a region which had fallen down in the world, since the days when its substantial houses--their line broken here and there by low-browed, covered-in ‘pends’--were occupied by more than one of the ‘Tobacco Lords’--the ancient autocrats of the West, sprouts from the great Highland houses who had pocketed their pride and stooped to prosecute trade in St. Mungo’s city instead of levying blackmail on the Lowland borders. These adventurous spirits had amassed great fortunes, and had strutted on the ‘plainstanes’ in their huge wigs and scarlet cloaks, as haughtily as in the days of their youth they had climbed their native braes in bonnets and kilts. Such magnates had long passed away. The tide of trade and fashion had altered more than once in the interval since sugar had got the better of tobacco, and cotton had rivalled sugar, and iron distanced cotton.

As for the cotton and iron lords, they were no longer content with gloomy houses near the old College and the Cathedral, from which the dweller could patronize learning and hold intercourse with the professors and clergy--ignoring their comparative poverty because they, too, were of gentle birth, while book-knowledge has always had its value in Scotland. Far less were the modern traders satisfied with country houses by the Kelvin or down near the Broomielaw. Glasgow was spreading out north and south, and east and west. The old houses, which had become centres of a great population, instead of standing on the outskirts of a town, were constantly passing into lower hands or changing their character. The buildings were occupied by shopkeepers and warehousemen, or let out in lodgings, or, after sustaining a gutting-out process, flourishing anew as shops, where in former days no shops, however select, had broken in upon the genteel retirement of ‘family mansions.’

Like houses, like people; many of the proud, prosperous old families had fallen from their high estate, and stood on an inferior footing, forced to yield in wealth and influence to new men coming to the front in new branches of industry--men frequently not drawn from the gentler ranks, either of the Highlands or Lowlands, who had been ‘hands’ before they were ‘heads,’ and, along with the sterling qualities which had raised their owners, were apt to retain much of the original clay with which they had been clogged.

The class which was superseded had only the pride of their superior antiquity and gentility to console them, and naturally clung tenaciously and not very amiably to these antecedents. The Miss Mackinnons were come of the outstripped, borne-down rulers of the past. Their father had been a man in a better position than the one they filled. Their grandfather had been far before their father. As for their great-grandfather, ‘a’ Glasgy,’ as Miss Janet was wont to say, ‘trim’led at the wag o’ his finger.’ Unfortunately, his descendants had little more than his memory to plume themselves upon.

But it seemed as if the fortunes of the Mackinnons were about to revive--not in the persons of the ladies, whose prospects of advantageous matrimonial alliances, never great, were slipping slowly but surely from the reluctant women’s grasp--but in the case of their eldest nephew, the head of their branch of the family. Gavin Mackinnon was about to marry an heiress in her own right--not such an heiress as a Glasgow Mackinnon might once have aspired to--but a lass whose family was not without drawbacks and little mortifying objections, which the ladies, if not their nephew, swallowed with a manifest effort of complacence.

Still, here was an undoubted heiress who had succeeded through her mother to a small landed property, the worth of which was increased tenfold by calico-printing and dye-works built on the land, also the property of Miss Craig, when such works had come into repute as sources of trade and wealth that would hold their own against the cotton industries thus supplemented.

No Mackinnon had married a bride with so promising a patrimony for the last two generations. Certainly the trumpeters of the family recoiled a little from the obligation of their nephew to take up calico-printing and dying as a calling, which was something widely different from possessing estates in Virginia, that furnished broad Scotland, and England to boot, with wholesale supplies of the crop of the country.

In addition, the elder ladies could have wished that Miss Craig had been able to claim more commercially aristocratic kindred; nevertheless, she and her dowry were by no means to be despised. ‘There would be plenty of the cotton and iron dirt’--Miss Janet was guilty of indicating the nouveaux riches in these terms--‘who, for all their bragging that they were rolling in wealth, would jump fast enough at Maggie Craig, with her cash and Drysdale--her grand-uncle-by-marriage’s auld farm-house, print-factory, and dye-vats.’

It was more of a recommendation than the reverse to the Mackinnons, that Miss Craig, who had been sent home from India for her education, had few relations in this country, and was so far dependent on the good offices of the Glasgow kinswoman of her future husband. It was a matter of resignation, to say the least, to these fairly humane and well-intentioned persons, that Miss Craig’s mother, from whom she inherited her property, had died when she was an infant, and that her father had married again since she left India. It would have been a thousand pities for her to return there to her strange step-mother, especially when the tenant to whom the calico-printing works were let, who had made a good thing out of them, was retiring at the end of his lease on a competence, leaving the business with the works to a successor, who might or might not be the husband of the owner.

The Craigs were nobodies; and the Drysdales who were before them at Drysdale Haugh were little better, ‘farming bodies’ of a homely kind, though the land had been their own; while calico-printing and dyeing had not yet reached such a magnitude as to elevate calico-printers and dyers to the rank that the tobacco-traders had held--they were hardly on a level with cotton and iron manufacturers.

But when Gavin Mackinnon turned up, crossed Miss Craig’s path, proposed for her, and on her acceptance of his hand boldly undertook to become a printer and dyer on his own account, his aunts were not so destitute of the shrewdness of a trading population as to fail to hail the windfall which had come to the family, and the staff which had been put into Gavin’s not too capable hand.

It was a pleasure to the gradually aging women that the marriage should take place in their house. In addition to the lively interest which women in general find in all that belongs to a wedding, intensified to the highest pitch of excitement when the actors by proxy are past their grand climacteric and have lost the sanguine expectation of becoming brides themselves, the Miss Mackinnons had a natural liking, seldom gratified, for dispensing counsel, and ordering and presiding in matters of consequence.

They were all three tall, stout women, rather imposing-looking in their very plainness. It was an advantage to the two elder sisters that they assumed the matronly style in dress which ought to have been theirs, had fortune been kinder, and men more solicitous of their favour. They wore, if not caps, at least a sufficient quantity of lace disposed about their heads to shade what was gaunt or heavy. Pelerines and huge falling collars had gone out for young women, but older people still indulged in them, and they were not without a certain dignity which suited large proportions. The third sister, Miss Bethia (pronounced with the accent on the ‘i’) did herself less justice. She put on gowns of gayer colours and flimsier materials, and arranged her unsheltered hair in a much more youthful fashion of elaborate plaits and braids.

Miss Mackinnon was developing deafness which she declined absolutely to acknowledge, and the greater part of her time was spent in clearing up the misconceptions--the inevitable growth of habitually hearing and speaking at cross purposes. She had grown both tart and stupid under the process, otherwise she would not have been less intelligent and agreeable than her sisters, which, perhaps, was not saying much, for the Miss Mackinnons had been brought up under desperately narrowing influences and with overwhelming prejudices. Miss Janet had come to the front as the result of Miss Mackinnon’s deafness; she was left to lay down the law, while her long tongue and restless energy kept her from granting her victim a moment’s respite.

Miss Bethia represented the accomplishments of the ladies. She was fondly believed to be one of the best piano-players in Glasgow, which meant that she thundered through half-forgotten pieces with stunning din and astounding celerity, and played reels with more spirit than delicacy. In spite of the family’s income, she worked indefatigably for pleasure, and at considerable cost, in wools and silks, heaping up trophies only too gorgeous in the shape of cushions and stools and screens, in the otherwise faded and antiquated drawing-room. She had a simper hovering about her large mouth which was absent from her sisters’ faces, and seemed to say that in spite of Miss Bethia’s ponderous nose, light blinking eyes, with barely visible eye-lashes, and tow-like hair, much on the pattern of the other members of the family, she laboured under the delusion that she was the beauty no less than the genius of her race. It is hardly necessary to say that Miss Bethia was the most foolish of the sisterhood.

There was a redeeming feature in the Miss Mackinnons’ characters which did something to make up for their intolerable conceit and tendency to constitute themselves and their opinions the centre of the universe, before which all mankind was to bow. They were strongly attached to each other. None deferred more loyally to Miss Mackinnon than did Miss Janet and Miss Bethia; a fond mother could hardly have been prouder of a cherished daughter’s performances than were the elder sisters of the younger’s prowess on the ‘piany’ and in fancy-work.

One of the peculiarities of the female Mackinnon mind was that it scorned any attempt in Scotch people to speak ‘high English.’ As the ladies’ voices were naturally loud, and they had accustomed themselves to speak still more loudly to suit Miss Mackinnon’s infirmities, the effect of their homely Scotch shouted to each other or to any visitor was decidedly startling to a new-comer. Another thing the sisters could not abide was a silly pretence at polished instead of plain manners. Such weak copying of their neighbours, or yielding to changes which were no improvements, were for ‘the cotton and iron dirt.’ Such trifles were far beneath the attention of the Mackinnons. These favoured mortals needed no artificial props. The family’s claims to precedence were so unanswerable that a Mackinnon might do exactly as he or she liked, within the bounds of the moral law, for the maiden representatives of the house were respectable Christians and staunch Presbyterians, assured that the name would grace any speech or action, and confer, not derive, lustre from it.

Only a small moiety of the world took the Miss Mackinnons at their own estimation, and the moiety was ever decreasing. Strange to say, Maggie Craig, a simple yet aspiring girl, was among the worshippers at the nearly deserted shrine. These absurd elderly women contrived to throw dust in her young eyes. Her chief inducement to marry Gavin Mackinnon was that he was the first man who had made her an offer, and that he was big--big in various ways--in speech as well as in bodily inches, and so filled a certain space in her world. But her next reason was that in marrying him she would enter into one of the oldest and best Glasgow families, which to Maggie signified as much as if she had referred to one of the patriarchal houses of ancient Rome, and that she might thenceforth hold up her head in the light of being closely allied to the unapproachable cream of the inhabitants of her father’s native city.

Therefore the bride-elect was highly gratified instead of being intensely bored by the invitation from her future husband’s aunts to make their house her home, and be married from it, rather than from the house of a business correspondent of her father’s or of a school-companion of her own, nearly all the choice she could command.

Mr. Craig had sent home a formal consent to the marriage. It was little more than a form, since Maggie was of age and could please herself. He dimly remembered the Mackinnons as something beyond the common and above his mark when he left Scotland. He had not known anything of them in later days so as to modify his opinion. At the same time, his parental interest in Maggie, and his impression that she was doing well for herself, did not go the length of tempting him to return before his time. He had younger children, who, as they had never been separated from him, had eclipsed the first-born in his affections, and he was at once easy-going and slow to be moved from the plans of his whole life. He left Maggie to her own discretion, and trusted her to her new friends. He would come home, if he lived, at the date he had originally fixed.

It was the night before the wedding--a frosty winter night, which caused a slight shudder in the minds of stay-at-home people at the thought of the railway journey to London--the sum-total of the bridal tour. A jaunt to London in winter, and to the Highlands or Ireland in summer, were the stereotyped wedding-trips which had always floated dimly before the Miss Mackinnons’ imaginations; and it is needless to say the sisters had imposed their standard on the younger generation by sheer strength of will and loudness of tongue. Gavin Mackinnon was something of sounding brass himself, but he was quiet and yielding compared to the redoubtable aunts. Maggie was a cipher in their hands in the meantime.

In spite of what might have been supposed to be the Miss Mackinnons’ skill and experience as tacticians in a general way, they had as a matter of course not been familiar with marriages. The grey house in the weather-beaten, smoke-darkened square was in the greatest disorder. There was not a room clear of bride’s-cake, or white gloves--‘livery,’ the elder ladies called them--or new gowns, or travelling trunks. There was hardly a place in which to receive the two lawyers who came for the important purpose of reading and getting the signatures to the marriage contract. The Miss Mackinnons had talked so much for the last ten days that they were not fit for anything else. The bridegroom, finding it less trouble to agree than to contradict, had acquiesced accordingly--in spite of his pompousness. Maggie was only occupied in considering how soon she would be a Mackinnon, with all the privileges of the race.

The marriage settlement, which was as necessary for the dignity of the family as for the safety of Miss Craig, was left to take care of itself or to be concocted by the aunts. Luckily they were perfectly honest, and had no thought of taking advantage of their new relative. Luckily, too, for the sense and reason of the document, Miss Craig’s lawyer was on the spot, and had been invited to join another member of the profession--the Mackinnon family lawyer--in drawing up the deed. Miss Janet was persuaded that none of the preparations would prosper unless she were, as she said, ‘at the heels of them.’ But she was now entertaining a visitor who had come on a call of congratulation and inspection.

Miss Carstairs was a little woman, a contemporary and old friend of the Miss Mackinnons--one who had come within the charmed circle of old Glasgow. She now sat coolly and contentedly in the middle of the confusion, where old silver dishes and ‘dead-fine’ table linen, hunted out of ‘presses’ to do honour to the occasion, lay about among railway-rugs, leather straps and time-tables on the little ebony tables and bamboo chintz-covered chairs and couches of the drawing-room. The dining-room, with its heavy mahogany and horse-hair furniture, and fine old punch-bowl below the sideboard, pointing back to the days when Glasgow punch had been famous, was given up, as a place of superior gravity and masculine simplicity, to the lawyers with their pen and ink, and the young couple who were to profit by these appliances.

‘Our marriage settlements,’ said Miss Janet in her powerful voice to her crony, as if she and her sisters had been married two or three times over, ‘were aye made siccar, though in the making they covered ever so many pages of parchment. My great-grandfather’s was, like his will, as big as a sma’ book. He married a Fenton--Jean Fenton--and it is through her me and my sisters have an interest in Strathdivie--that is, if ever the Fentons of Strathdivie fail, we’ll come in for our share as heirs female through my great-grandmother, Jean Fenton. Oo aye, this settlement between my nephew Gauvin and Miss Craig is but a flea-bite compared to our former settlements. But that is no reason it should not be made richt and ticht, with a lawyer on our side, Dauvit Milne--we’ve always employed that firm--and a lawyer on hers, new graith [growth], but a decent enough man, I believe, a Mr. Dalgleish. Do you ken him, Miss Carstairs?’

‘I should think so,’ said Miss Carstairs, a little drily; ‘you’ve forgotten, Miss Janet, he married my niece Tina. They’ve a place in the Highlands, where I stayed three weeks with them last summer.’

Miss Janet did not trouble herself to apologize for what might have been a slip of the tongue; on the contrary, she rushed upon a fresh offence. ‘A place in the Hielants, and he a writer body that lives by pen and ink, and cannot date back two generations!’ she exclaimed, in a high, protesting key. ‘After that Dauvit Milne may have his London mansion, and his shooting-box in the Sooth.’ The irony was more plain than gracious; but graciousness was not a quality in which Miss Janet Mackinnon excelled. ‘Weel,’ she added with emphasis, after a pause, as if the world’s verdict hung on her sentence, ‘I’ve nothing particular to say against it--save that “dockens will aye be waggin’,”’ she ended with admirable candour.

Miss Carstairs gave an indignant sniff, but she knew Miss Janet too well to resent her unconscionable rudeness. Besides, it was the Dalgleishes who were stigmatized as ‘dockens.’ Miss Carstairs was as well descended as any Mackinnon of them, and could afford to overlook the sneer.

‘It was touch-and-go with that will,’ remarked the eldest Miss Mackinnon, with her usual irrelevancy, for she had caught only stray fragments of the conversation. ‘If she had died an hour or twa suner, our Miss Craig would have lost every penny. It would have been maist unnatural that she should not have profited by her mother’s succession, but auld Drysdale never mentioned heirs. He was a hot-headed stubborn man, and though he had a great work with Beenie Pryde, he never liked Jock Craig. It was not with the uncle’s will that the niece made the marriage. But, as I said, it was a mercy she died when she did, though I’ve heard tell that if she had so much as given a pech or sech [groan or sigh] after his breath was out, the property would have been hers, and would have come in the course of nature, as it has done, to her dochter, her heiress.’

‘She’s speaking of how Miss Craig’s mother came into her inheritance,’ Miss Janet hastened to explain, carefully lowering her voice; ‘she’s thinking of wills and deaths, instead of settlements and marriages, no that they’re so far apart. Yes, it was just so, auld Drysdale left his money to his niece by marriage. He had no near relations, and though he had the word of being hard, he had aye a soft heart for the memory of his young wife who pined and died long before she saw her prime. He took her sister’s dochter, Beenie Pryde, and brocht her up to keep his house, and was as fond of her as if she had been his ain bairn. But there was an odds for all that; he could never altogether forgive her for marrying Jock Craig, and though he left her his means, as he had come bound to do, when he took her to rear, he did not trouble to mention her wean, that had not a drop of his blude in its veins.’

‘Well, I mind something of the story, but I never heard all the ins and outs of it before. The Drysdales were not in our set, Miss Janet,’ said mild Miss Carstairs, not without what these old-fashioned ladies would have called a ‘fling’ at her hostess, in return for Miss Janet’s treatment of Miss Carstairs’ niece Tina and her ‘writer body’ of a husband.

‘Who said the Drysdales were in our set, Kate Carstairs?’ demanded Miss Janet defiantly.’ They were not such fules as to set themselves up so far beyond their standing. They kenned their place and keepit it, which was more to their credit. But that did not prevent auld Drysdale’s being a man of some substance,’ composing herself to resume her story. ‘When the news of his death and his inheritance was sent out to where the Craigs had gone, it was found that she had died after giving birth to a lass bairn--our Miss Craig--the very same day that the auld man her uncle’s breath went out at Drysdale Haugh. I tell you, Miss Carstairs, it was nothing short of a dispensation of Providence that he was gone before her by the space of three hours, or Maggie Craig could not have touched plack or penny of his,’ ended Miss Janet, excited by the crisis of her narrative.

‘She would have had to hurry if she would overtake him in his journey,’ remarked Miss Mackinnon, with a smile that was a little ghastly, as a commentary on the conversation.

‘What’s she after now?’ inquired Miss Janet, fairly mystified. ‘Oh, I mind,’ her face clearing up; ‘she’s so keen to lose nothing we say. Meye’s very sharp, but she’s apt to jump from subject to subject, by all the world like a bird from branch to branch. She’s off, as she thinks we are, to a joke we had among oursel’s this morning, of the bride’s remaining behind to look after the gear, and the presents that had not made their appearance in time, while the bridegroom went the first stage in solitary state. But I must awa’ to keep Gauvin and Miss Craig in countenance while they hear the settlement read--a trial to young folks in their position--and to append my signature as witness. I’ll leave nothing undone that I put my hand to. You’ll forgive me for leaving you, Miss Carstairs. You know, it’s not an ordinary occasion. If you like to stop till I come back, Meye here can be showing you Gauvin’s “traps,” as he calls them, his dressing-case and the studs and things in it, for I think you’ve looked over the bride’s paraphernely, or Betheye--I hear her coming in, she has been awa’ about the cards--will give you a tune.’

‘No, thank you very much, Miss Janet,’ said Miss Carstairs, rising and expressing all the more gratitude because of the positiveness of her refusal. ‘I must run away myself--you will forgive me for having detained you so long, at such an important time, with so much on your mind as I see you have. The bride can have nothing to think of in comparison.

‘I dare say no,’ Miss Janet accepted the implied compliment unhesitatingly, and without limitation. ‘What has a young thing like her to take up her mind about but to look bonnie and please Gauvin? It is me and my sisters that have to care for them baith and see that nothing’s forgotten, and to keep the cook and confectioner, the session-clerk and the minister, up to the mark.’

‘I can feel for you, Miss Janet. When my niece Tina was married, though it was out of her father’s house, not mine, and it was not quite the same thing’--Miss Carstairs corrected herself hastily, catching a warning flicker of Miss Janet’s light blue eyes; ‘for Tina did condescend a wee bit, though Mr. Dalgleish’s a steady lad, and getting into a fine business, and there’s something to be allowed for a lassie’s choice--my very heels were sore, and I could not sleep for a week.’

‘What are you saying about quadreels, or was it reels, Miss Carstairs?’ asked Miss Mackinnon. ‘No, we’re to have no dance, only a degoonay in the French fashion.’

‘I’ll not forget a bit of the cake with your cards,’ Miss Bethia assured the departing guest. ‘I’m to have charge of the cakes and cards, and you must promise to dream upon the cake.’

‘Hoots! Miss Betheye, I’m done with dreams, which does not mean that you should be, you that can give us “Wooed, an’ married, an’ a’” so that our feet can hardly keep still, while I’m “timber-tuned.” You have so many more pretty pieces of work than those you’ve so handsomely presented to Miss Craig that she may get them made up for her drawing-room, it would be a real pity they should be wasted.’

‘Awa’ with you, Kate Carstairs!’ cried Miss Janet, while Miss Bethia’s simper passed into a giggle; ‘would you rather have Bethia wasted than the ottomans and cushions, however elegant or creditable to her taste and industry? You would not have Betheye stoop to a man not in every way worthy of her and her family; and where is such a man to be found at this time of the day, I should like to hear?’

CHAPTER II.

TIME’S CHANGES.

Seven-and-twenty years had passed with all their changes since the winter night on which Gavin Mackinnon and Margaret Craig’s marriage contract was signed. Six-and-twenty years had intervened since Mr. David Milne--the solitary representative of an old firm of Glasgow ‘writers’--had wound up their century-long business, disposed of what was left, and retired with the accumulated gains to buy an estate in Kirkcudbright, and begin a new life as the founder of a family of Galloway lairds. Four-and-twenty years had elapsed since Mr. Dalgleish, the husband of Miss Carstairs’ niece Tina, finding the field too well occupied already, or that law was not so profitable in the West of Scotland as it had been, accepted a colonial appointment, and sailed with his family for New Zealand, to sit on endless boundary questions and judge the rights and wrongs of Maoris and settlers.

Seven-and-twenty years, with all their vicissitudes--vigorous, full lives vanished like shadows, leaving no traces behind; new lives which had dawned and risen above the horizon, advancing to the hot glow of their noon; old stranded lives lingering on, apparently without use or purpose.

The superannuated house in the old square was little changed, except that the narrow means of its occupants had grown narrower, until they pinched with the sharp pinch of poverty. Each one of the Miss Mackinnons was in her place, though it was becoming always harder and more comfortless. There had been a business speculation--soon coming to grief--into which the ladies had rashly let themselves be drawn, with the urgent desire of getting higher interest for their small capital. The end had been that the disaster which followed had swallowed up the larger part of the Miss Mackinnons’ pittance.

The poor ladies had eked out what was left by the secret sale, bit after bit, extending over a period of years, of what they had been accustomed to cling to fondly as the proofs of their old gentility--quaint silver plate, a few jewels, a considerable quantity of fine lace--until the disposal of the family’s effects had come down to table and bed linen, and articles of furniture in daily use, which would fetch little money, while their absence would be severely felt. And always as the surreptitious sale approached its conclusion, starvation or the workhouse stared the unfortunate gentlewomen more fully in the face. Still they lived on, though the middle age of twenty-seven years ago was the old age of to-day--old age without its privileges and indulgences; while Miss Mackinnon was stone-deaf, and could only be communicated with by means of the slate and slate-pencil which hung behind her chair, or through a set of signs which the patient ingenuity of faithful affection had invented and maintained for her use.

Miss Bethia, after a futile attempt to teach her antiquated system of music, had relinquished her piano and laid aside her embroidery, which proved unsaleable, to work at plain sewing, secretly disposed of at the very shop where the Mackinnons’ custom had still been an esteemed compliment in the days of Miss Bethia’s youth. Miss Janet did a servant’s work behind backs, in addition to taking her place before the world among the ladies of the house.

Withal something heroic had crept in with the suffering into these narrow lives--something of Spartan endurance of hardship, of generous self-denial, of steadfast submission to the Providence that knew best what was fit for all. The Miss Mackinnons were frequently absurd enough, and in the increasing isolation of their experience they were getting homelier and more rugged and uncouth, falling back more and more on their old Scotch and their primitive manners, which they had always declined to lay aside, as something which had been good enough for former Mackinnons, so was good enough for their descendants and for the world till the end of time. But the women had never been so like ladies as in their silent, desperate fight with overpowering odds.

A grain of hope remained at the bottom of this Pandora’s box. The Fentons of Strathdivie had not been so tenacious of existence as the Mackinnons in St. Mungo Square. One after another had dropped into his or her grave without direct heirs, till at last there was but one ailing man between the ladies and their share of Strathdivie.

It had better be said at once that Strathdivie in its entirety was nothing more than a moorland farm in one of the wards of Lanarkshire, which, in the present state of agriculture, was anything save a flourishing possession; and it had not the supplement of dye-works or bleachworks, or coal or iron seams, to multiply its worth. Divided into portions, the allotment that might come to the Miss Mackinnons was so trifling that no man need have led a grudged life because of it. Yet that pittance meant such comparative ease and security to these hardly-bested souls that they could not help contemplating it afar off with longing eyes. It was the hidden burden on the consciences of all the three that they were wishing ill to poor Archie Fenton, not caring to hear that he had any chance of getting hale and hearty again, privately calculating on the probable length of days of a man who was younger than two of the sisters.

To intensify the cruel uncertainty, it was suspected that on the few occasions on which Mr. Fenton and the Miss Mackinnons had met, for the connection between the families had belonged not to the present but to former generations, the two elder sisters--Miss Janet especially--had been so unfortunate as to give offence to the disposer of Strathdivie. She had interfered, as usual, where it was a particular want of tact and taste to interfere; and she had perhaps betrayed only too unmistakably what were her expectations with regard to the farm in the Middle Ward; while, it was believed, Archie Fenton was not without some power to ‘will away’ from his distant cousins their share of his property.

But surely he could not be so unnatural and unjust, the Miss Mackinnons argued with whitening lips. Blood was thicker than water, and a dying man would not dare to face his Maker after he had robbed his kindred, however remote, of their lawful patrimony.

Where were Gavin Mackinnon and his wife that they did not come to the help of their aged kinswomen? One might as well ask where were last year’s leaves that they did not continue to clothe with fresh green the gaunt grey boughs of some venerable tree. The years which had spared the Miss Mackinnons had been as fatal to their nephew and niece as to the Fentons of Strathdivie. Both had gone to their long home many a day before. Ere their deaths the dyeing and calico-printing had thriven so badly in his incapable hands that first he had tried a partner in the concern, and that device not succeeding, he had, in the course of three or four more years, got from his wife the power of selling the property to the same purchaser to whom he had, in conjunction with his partner, already disposed of the business. The buyer of both was the son of a cousin of old Drysdale’s, the original laird of Drysdale Haugh. The younger Drysdale was a man whose father had sunk to a very inferior position. The son, on the contrary, had risen through every grade, till he was not only the sole proprietor of works and farm, but had improved and extended them, had made them a great concern, and had ended by building a fine mansion-house as an addition to the old farmhouse.

Neither Gavin Mackinnon nor his wife had lived to hear what another man’s sagacity and energy had made of what they had let slip through their fingers. She had not seen the fifth anniversary of their marriage, and he had not survived her as many more years. There were people who said the couple had been done to ruin and death by the Miss Mackinnons’ powers of talking and interference in their nephew’s private affairs. But everybody who knew anything about it was aware that Gavin Mackinnon could never have made anything of a trade to which he was not bred; and what was she fit for save to spend or spare as much of her own money as came into her hands? Then she died, as her mother had done before her--in giving birth to an only child, about whose arrival in this world his grand-aunts had certainly made as much fuss as if he were the heir to an earldom. Still, all things considered, these were circumstances over which the Miss Mackinnons could not have had much control. Neither ought they to have been held accountable for their nephew’s premature demise, seeing that no amount of enlarging even on disagreeable topics, and putting fingers into other people’s pies, could cause a wet autumn, telling considerably on a man who had never been alert about anything in his life save sport. In this particular instance he pursued it in soaking rain, till he caught a violent cold, which settled on his lungs and carried him off in ten days.

During the lives of the husband and wife the sale of Drysdale Haugh had furnished them with a considerable sum in ready money, which they had not had time to spend, though he especially had done his best to get rid of what was so unfamiliar to him. What was left fell to their son, who had been reared, so far, under the care of his grand-aunts. But while he was a minor he could do nothing for them, and by the time he was of age so much of his patrimony had been spent on his education--worthy the last of the St. Mungo Square Mackinnons--and so much more in gratifying his kinswomen’s shortsighted pride and his own boyish fancy by the purchase of a commission for him in an infantry regiment, that there was little left to spare from his small income.

Lieutenant Eneas Mackinnon was the pride and delight of his old relatives, the one cause of congratulation in the middle of their reverses, the single gleam of light in their far-spent, darkening days! For his credit and advantage they would sacrifice the little that remained to them, while he had only a dim idea of the straits to which the old ladies were reduced. He had wished to do something for them out of his chronic impecuniosity, and it was in a great measure their fault that they would accept next to nothing at his hands, lest the dear lad should be stinted and not able to make a fair show among his brother officers.

CHAPTER III.

TAM DRYSDALE IN HIS OFFICE.

There is no street in the whole city of bells and chimney-stacks with a greater and richer mercantile traffic, containing more offices in which business is conducted on a larger scale, than one of the side streets running parallel to the handsome thoroughfare of Buchanan Street. At certain business hours the street is as crowded with merchants and merchants’ clerks, warehousemen, wholesale dealers in all the commodities under the sun, as the Broomielaw is with porters and sailors, the Sautmarket and the Gorbals with naturalized Highlanders and Irish, or the different yards and lanes with craftsmen and mill-hands. When the swarm of dark-coloured ants hurry along the pavement, it is clear they mean business, hearty though the greetings are which burst from the deep-throated, deep-chested pedestrians, worthy of the warm hearts and frank tongues--careless of sing-song patois--of the mighty men of Clydesdale. They will not tarry on their errands; they have to put their shoulders to the wheel with a will, to bear up the load imposed upon them. No doubt these sons of Anak, like their servants the porters bearing the material bales and boxes, carry the burden of engagements and obligations unflinchingly, well-nigh swaggeringly. Still the giants show an inclination to get their work done as soon as may be, to allow greater time for play. Carriage, or dogcart, or steamer--the last in summer especially--whirl or puff the men away to the country-houses, with their trim avenues and well-kept parks; or the villas, luxurious as those of Roman citizens, by some mountain-girt loch of the blue Clyde, where pines replace the olive trees and heather the roses.

At such early hours as are devoted to the patron saint of business--shall we say St. Luke?--few women, even when tucked under the wing, or following in the wake of husband, brother, or son, venture to bring the light incongruous flutter of their gowns, and the disturbing element of their unabsorbed faces into the rank and file of the workers. Heads of famous houses, young men with their fortunes yet to make, press on as if they would trample down all obstacles, and protest in self-defence ‘the de’il tak’ the hin’most!’

Who would think that within a day’s journey from that striving, money-making mass of humanity the solemn Atlantic breaks on wild, lone shores, where the cry of the seamew is the only voice to break the awful stillness?

Within a certain solidly handsome door, over which a porter of substance held sway, up a good staircase, under the circumstances singularly spotless, any stranger invading the territory would find another door, or rather pair of folding-doors, standing open. One of the doors bore a brass plate on which had been engraved the address--‘Messrs. Mackinnon & Murray, Dyers and Calico-Printers.’ The engraver’s tool had passed over three of the words, and the place knew its owners no more. The name which had replaced the others was that of ‘Drysdale.’ But though so much change had been made, the word ‘Messrs.’ was left to read like a foolish grammatical blunder, or as if the remainder of the address hung in suspense, which was the true explanation. The omission was not by accident, but by design. ‘Let a-be’ the present master of the office had charged the respectfully-remonstrating engraver. ‘That may stand till another Tam makes up his mind, and then “& Son” can easily be added.’ He referred with would-be carelessness to his only son, and to the chance on which he had set his heart, that his one boy might join him in his career, might take up and extend the threads of all his projects, and, when he laid them down, might hand them over to a third generation. There was a little lurking superstition in the sparing of the ‘Messrs.’ already inscribed there, inappropriate as it was in the meantime. There was also the economy, almost parsimony, in trifles, which, in view of a future exigency, would save the smallest risk of unnecessary expense.

Yet this was a man whose intelligence and enterprise had enabled him to supersede his masters, rising gradually to their level, and then soaring far beyond it, building up from a moderate foundation such a great business of its kind, as any man of his type might have been proud to claim for his individual handiwork. His daily business transactions involved questions of thousands. He did not think twice of signing a cheque for one or two of those thousands, to get possession of a picture that caught his untutored fancy rather than his cultivated taste. His wife’s diamonds were as brilliant as any to be met with in her circle, which was saying a good deal. He would have given a hundred for a hunter for his son, if Tam junior would have hunted with his compeers, the young swells of the mercantile world. He did give as much for a pony phaeton in perfect keeping, in which Claribel, or even little Eppie, could drive out her mother. But he objected all the same to the small waste in effacing the ‘Messrs.’ which might have ample significance in the years yet to be born.

Tam Drysdale’s office not only held a large staff, it displayed every modern improvement and well-considered plan for their accommodation. Never were clerks better housed, stooled, or desked; blessed with more regular, if long, hours in a press of business; ensured greater punctuality at meal-times, or granted in turn more unfailing, if limited, holidays. But woe betide any of these ‘pets’ of Tam Drysdale’s, as they were sometimes termed derisively by less conscientious masters, if a subordinate was discovered shirking a duty or slurring over a task. These acts of cowardly, lubberly omission were treated as greater offences than what might have seemed heavier sins of commission, in the shape of occasional fits of folly and dissipation. Tam Drysdale had the scorn for prodigality and the disgust at intemperance which might be expected from a man whose rise in the world had been, in some degree, the result of his prudence and sobriety from youth to middle age. But he had mercy on a feather-headed lad who had got into debt for a gold watch and chain before he had earned them, or a suit of clothes the price of which was beyond the depth of his pocket. The employer had also a considerable amount of rueful pity for a middle-aged sinner who had at one time stood several steps higher than Tam on the social ladder, but who had lost heart, and sought desperately to console himself for the slowness of fortune in favouring him, by buying Dutch courage and oblivion, in swallowing the enemy that stole away his brains. On the other hand, for the lad or man who trifled or idled, and cheated his master of his services, Tam Drysdale was apt to have judgment without mercy. No wrathful words of ‘lazy blackguaird’ or ‘useless scoondrel’ were hot and sharp enough to launch at the culprit.

Tam Drysdale sat, like the king in the nursery rhyme, counting over his money, in the inner sanctum, which in many respects reflected the man. The various articles it contained--desk, table, chairs, carpet--were at once the very best and the very plainest of mahogany, morocco, and Kidderminster. The place was the essence of commercial comfort, and even neatness, as if a woman and not a man drew up the blinds, set the chairs at the proper angles, arranged the ledgers, and filed the papers. The room was almost ostentatiously complete, but there was an absence of luxury, a failure to recognise or claim any article that was out of the ordinary catalogue of office furniture, an impatience, bordering on contempt, of finery or frippery here, though it might be very well at Drysdale Hall.

Tam Drysdale, leaning back in his chair, summing up an account with a little knit in his brow, was not far above fifty years of age, and in spite of all he had done before he reached his half-century he did not look older. He was a hale man still, not beyond abundantly capable middle life. He was below the ordinary standard of his native district with regard to size. He was not the ‘braw man’ whose stature alone ensures him popular admiration in the west of Scotland. He was little above the middle height, and he was so finely built that he looked less than he was. But it was a wiry slightness, and a delicacy that was tempered like the keenness of steel. There were force and activity in every well-knit, cleanly cut limb and feature; and the time had been when, in spite of his antagonists’ greater height and weight, Tam Drysdale had excelled in various muscular sports calling for more than accuracy of eye and speed of foot, such as quoits, shinty, etc.

Tam’s clothes were of the best broadcloth, but old-fashioned and somewhat clumsy, as well as out of date. There was a suspicion of uncouthness in the style of the coat and vest, down to the very shoes which were not boots, that vexed the soul of Mrs. Drysdale, and even of Claribel, though young Eppie never could see that her father was anything save perfect, both in his outer and inner man. The truth was that Tam--very indulgent to his womankind in most particulars--became restive and utterly unmanageable when he was pursued into the holes and corners of what he reckoned his own affairs. He would not desert his old tailor, who had made Tam’s wedding suit and risen in the world with him, so far as a one-horse chaise and a villa at Gourock, though the poor fellow did not follow all the freaks of fashion, and could not please a parcel of fools of women. Tam would not make a puppy or an ass of himself by dressing in a manner which would better befit his son. This was supposing that young Tam ever condescended, nowadays, to appear in a coat superior to the last year’s shooting-jacket, which was decidedly the worse of the wear, as his father’s coats never were.

In like manner, no power, less than his Queen’s command, would have induced Tam to drive in his well-appointed carriage to the door of his office. He stuck to the point that better men than he contented themselves with arriving at their places of business on their feet, or at most in their dogcarts, and he would never shame himself and them by instituting an odious comparison. He would not make himself a laughing-stock to his fellows--including his old cronies and his very clerks, who would be fully justified in saying that Tam Drysdale was as vain as a peacock, and had forgotten the nest he had sprung from.

The carriage was in Glasgow several days a week with Mrs. Drysdale and the girls, and, for the sake of their company, the owner of the equipage would consent to meet it at some appointed place, as far out of the way of his ordinary haunts and associations as possible, and would drive home in a species of incognita with his family. However, this was a weakness to be carefully concealed. None of Tam’s vainglory--rampant enough elsewhere--broke forth in this direction. He positively hid his diminished head, and shrank out of sight when he was detected in the deed. He would no more have been guilty of driving in solitary state through those familiar Glasgow streets, where he had been wont to walk in fustian, than he would have worn a feather or a jewel in his hat.

‘Me in a carriage for my convenience! humph! a cadger’s cart would set me better,’ he would say ironically. ‘What would folk think? What would folk say?’ (Tam was apt to regard himself as the cynosure of every eye, a source of endless interest and speculation to his public.) ‘Plenty of them to see that knew a’ about me when I had not a couple of bawbees to rub upon one anither. No, no! I’m not such a gowk as that comes to. I’ll not set a pack of impident fellows jeering and sneering. A carriage is all very well for mother, who is a woman and has married a rich man. Moreover, she deserves the best, and she shall have it, as sure as my name’s Tam Drysdale, as nice a turn-out as is to be seen in Glasgow. Neither the Provost nor Sir James can beat it. For the young folk, they’ve been born with silver spunes in their mouths, if that dour deevil, young Tam, would only sup oot of his spune and be thankful. But I was born to nothing better than a horn cutty [spoon], and a dugcart will serve my turn, as it has served mony a better man and mony a real gentleman born and bred.’

Tam had a great deal of appreciation, almost tender in its kind, of real gentlemen and ladies. He never ‘evened’ himself to be one of them; he never ‘evened’ ‘mother,’ much as he thought of her, and proud as he was of her achievements in social life. Certainly he was inclined to put an inordinate value on his success; he hugged himself on all that money could procure and bestow. He boasted that no duke, no prince, need come before him in the excellence and costliness of his surroundings. Money would buy the best, and the best Tam Drysdale, who had risen and thriven, would have in house and stud and cellar.

More than that--and Tam justly laid emphasis on the consideration--money would enable a man to benefit his fellow-creatures, to give them work, to insist that they should not live like brutes, to take measures for their higher civilization. But, in estimating the power of money, he drew the line with regard to what it could do beneath inherited gentle breeding. He never failed in the respect which belonged by right in his judgment to ancient gentility, however reduced in circumstances. He testified instinctively and unhesitatingly his honour for that to which neither he nor ‘mother’ could ever attain.

Nay, Tam had his doubts whether his very children could pretend to be a real gentleman and real ladies till another generation or two had lived and died. They might not do it--not young Tam, who was clever and college bred, and, if he did not awe, troubled his father considerably; not Claribel, who was as independent, had as fine a time of it, and was as innocent of considering anything beyond her own will and pleasure, as the American girls to whom she bore some resemblance; not even little Eppie, who was as kind and guileless as her mother, and was both her father and mother’s darling. Young Tam and the rest of them were on the way to what was beyond auld Tam’s aspirations; but they had not yet, with all the advantages their father had been proud to buy for them, reached the desirable goal.

Gentlemen and ladies, pure and simple, were removed several degrees from common clay in Tam Drysdale’s eyes. This implied no sycophancy or slavishness on the man’s part. He could assert his claims, if anything, a trifle too loudly. It belonged rather to a broad sense of justice which would be fair to every man, and own in another what he himself could not win--just as he expected that other to admit Tam Drysdale’s superior achievements in his own line. It might have something to do with Tam’s nationality; with the feudal element, the loyalty to heads of houses and clans which long survived in some form in Scotch society; with the slight but indestructible strain of poetry which often underlies the prosaic matter-of-factness of Lowland Scotch natures. Anyhow, there was found in the man this relieving trait of generous admiration and regard for what was not tangible property, and for what, unlike tangible property, could not be taken by assault on the part of the nouveau riche, the conqueror of modern times. The sentiment formed part of a composite character, and unquestionably it softened, to a wonderful extent, the vulgarity of the contrasting traits of self-sufficiency and ostentation.

Tam Drysdale’s face was so clean shaven that it not only rejected beard and moustache, it barely admitted of the most modestly cropped and abridged rather stubbly brown whisker to match the brown hair, hardly dashed with grey. It was a decidedly handsome face, of a massive type, with a square jaw, a square forehead, a good straight nose, and a good full mouth, which no self-indulgence had spoilt; while neither had a humid climate nor the apples and pears of the Clydeside orchards done anything to impair the whiteness and regularity of the strong even teeth, one of the many signs of health about the man. The colouring of the face was fresh, with its native ruddiness just toned down by office-work; but the hands, which had once been stained all the colours of the rainbow in the dye-vats, were now only too white and soft--not brown and hacked like young Tam’s, or even like those of young Eppie, who had a weakness for playing at boy’s games.

Taken all in all, the aspect of the calico-printer was wholesome and attractive, and it had much of the quiet power and burgher dignity which are to be found in many Dutch and Flemish portraits.

CHAPTER IV.

TAM DRYSDALE’S ALLIES.

It was impossible to stand aside and watch what went on in Tam Drysdale’s office, without seeing that he was a man of mark and influence in his sphere, not only by the number of men and of letters, in the interests of calico-printing and Turkey-red dyeing, constantly appearing on the scene, but by the tone which each speaker and writer adopted in approaching Tam. He was virtually acknowledged a leader of men in his calling. His opinion was consulted, his arbitration asked, his decision accepted. His word was in a manner law. He sat or stood there, a king in his domain. All who entered it paid him homage. His clerks were on the alert to meet his requirements. His wishes were anticipated. When he moved, everyone figuratively stood up; though literally no one hated form and ceremony more heartily than Tam Drysdale hated them. He was simple--one would say personally unassuming and unexacting in his habits, even in his greatest vanity. It was not that the man was a tyrant, or a martinet, or a fool, that he was so served and observed. It was a curious tribute to the natural strength of character, and a certain trust--inspiring, uncompromising honesty, which had always distinguished him.

Tam Drysdale’s clientèle were of an agreeably varied description. They did not come all on the same day, but specimens of them turned up frequently. Old city magnates, much more imposing and fashionable than the man they called on, who gave his broad shoulders a shake, and termed his visitors ‘new-fangled;’ grave and reverend signors, pursy and fussy, in the sister trade of cotton, who could have cut huge slices from the national debt, swallowed them wholesale, and not felt themselves seriously the worse. Bankers and lawyers who have always an interest in a man of capital; clergymen who feel bound in duty to themselves to avail themselves of the command of the mammon of unrighteousness, in return for their oversight of a parishioner’s soul. Young fops and bucks who condescended to know something of the mysteries of bleaching, dyeing, and printing, that these might procure the sinews of war wherewith to wage a feud to death with the fishes in the sea, the foxes on the hillsides, the grouse on the moors, or to keep up without stint or stay the luxuries of the gentlemen’s yachts, the amenities of their clubs, the splendour of their balls.

One of the richest of these young men sauntered in, and was treated with unmistakable coolness and stiffness; while the proposal that he was there to make was curtly rejected. There had been a question of a lawsuit of no great moment in which both men were engaged. The dispute referred to an encroachment on a patent in which they were equally interested. The abuse had not gone far, and the penalty which might be exacted would only amount to a moderate sum of money, of little consequence to a man with Tom Drysdale’s income. On the other hand, the suit was likely to be both troublesome and prolonged, and all the other persons engaged in it, with the exception of the lawyers, sought to quash it at this stage. But this Tam flatly refused to do.

‘I wull not, sir,’ he said, his politeness becoming more marked, while his dialect grew broader, under the provocation. ‘It is the principle I care for; it is justice I want; I will have the knavish trick exposed. Base loons, who knew perfectly well what they were about when they used the stamp! Punish a starving man for picking my pocket, and let off lazy rascals who have not the wit to know a good discovery when it is laid before them, but are cunning enough to set themselves to steal it, and grow rich at the expense of others! Never.’

The young man had to return more quickly than he came, muttering between his teeth, when he had passed out of the inner office, ‘A dour old brute. Grist to the lawyers’ mill.’

The last of Tam Drysdale’s levée were honest practical bleachers and dyers, who came to report progress in contract, to seek employment, to enter into an alliance offensive and defensive with the master of the Drysdale Haugh Works. Of this class, though of a different sex from the other members, was a respectable modest-looking young woman, not more than comely in her personal appearance, and, though clean and neat in her dress--a calico gown, black cape, and straw bonnet--altogether sober and out of date beyond her three or four and twenty years. To her Tam Drysdale turned with marked courtesy, and showed a reflection of fatherly kindness in his manner, as he rose up, waved her to a chair in his private room, and closed the door behind her.

‘Come awa’ in, Mary, my woman; I’m very gled to see you. Sit you down and rest you: you’ve had a long drive this dull grey day. How’s your father? Eh lass! but I mind him a fine man, the buirdliest [most stalwart] bleacher far and near. Well,’ in a more subdued, sympathetic tone, in answer to a sorrowful shake of the young woman’s head, ‘the strongest of us must grow weak as water when our time comes, and he is well off to have a gude dochter like you, Mary, since his gudewife is gone, to hold together the bit bleaching-ground, and keep the pot and the kettle boiling, and mind the other mitherless weans. I’ll tell you what, Mary Coates, though you should not hear it, maybe, you’re the very picture of your mither; you’re a fine, discreet, eydent kimmer [diligent girl] that any father might be proud of, and that some lad will be blithe, as well he may be, to call his marrow some day. You shall never want any small help that I can give you in your most honourable career, both for your father and mither’s sakes and for your ain!’ exclaimed Tam Drysdale, striking his hand on his desk in the determined manner of a man who had long been unaccustomed to contradiction, and who could rise to enthusiasm on occasions.